The Fight Between Carnival and Lent, by Pieter Brueghel the Elder, 1559. Painting of a village scene depicting revelers clashing with fasters; in the foreground is a jousting match between a fat man riding a beer cask and holding a lance adorned with various meats and a religious ascetic with a lance adorned with fish.
18 February 2021
In the Christian liturgical calendar, Lent is the season of fasting prior to Easter. It’s an odd word to the modern ear and has nothing to do with lending anything. Rather, the name comes from the Old English word lencten, originally designating the season of spring. The Old English word comes from a West Germanic root meaning long, a reference to the lengthening of days during the season.
For example, the word appears in an interlinear gloss of the Latin text of Psalm 73 in the Vespasian Psalter. The gloss was written in the Mercian dialect in the early ninth century:
Tu fecisti omnes terminos terrae, aestatem et uer tu fecisti ea
ðu dydes all gemæru eorðan sumur & lenten ðu dydes ða.
(You made all the boundaries of the earth: summer and spring, you made these.)
But in Old English lencten also came to mean the period of fasting prior to Easter, which happens in the spring. An entry in the Peterborough Chronicle for the year 1014 uses the word in an ambiguous sense. It could mean simply spring, or it could refer specifically to Lent. While the entry is for 1014, it was copied c. 1121*:
Ða com Æðelred cyning innan þam lenctene ham to his agenre ðeode, & he glædlice fram heom eallum onfangen wæs.
Then, during Lent, King Ethelred came home to his own people, and he was gladly received by them all.
That same chronicle, for the year 1107, uses the word to undisputedly refer to the liturgical period of fasting. Again, this entry was copied c. 1121:
On þisum geare to Cristesmæssan wæs se cyng Henri on Normandig & þet land on his geweald dihte & sette, & þæræfter to længtene hider to lande com.
(In this year King Henry was in Normandy at Christmas and in that land in his dominion he ruled and dwelled, and after that at Lent came back to this land.)
The word spring, metaphorically referring to the arising of new plant life, makes its appearance in the fourteenth century, and with it the use of lent to refer to the season faded, leaving us only with the liturgical meaning.
* The series of early medieval English historical chronicles often called by the misnomer Anglo-Saxon Chronicle were all produced, directly or indirectly, from a single exemplar. Scribes would copy older entries from a version they had access to and then add new entries for each year as it passed. As a result, the different chronicles all start off identically with one of the earlier versions but diverge idiosyncratically at different points. The Peterborough Chronicle was started c. 1121, with unique entries starting in 1122 and continuing through 1154.
Sources:
Irvine, Susan, ed. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle: A Collaborative Edition 7 MS E, vol. 7 of 7. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2004, 71, 115. Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS. Laud Misc. 636. JSTOR.
Kuhn, Sherman M., ed. The Vespasian Psalter. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan Press, 1965, 70. London, British Library MS Cotton Vespasian A.1. HathiTrust Digital Archive.
Middle English Dictionary, 2019, s.v. lent(en.
Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, September 2017, s.v. Lent, n.1, Lenten, n. and adj., spring, n.1
Image credit: Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna. Public domain image.